You do realize that in general the bigger the country, the larger the proportion of land area (and thus population) to perimeter is? Very important from a national perspective is of course also how much of your border is coastline (which in the case of The Netherlands is roughly half of it). Also important is of course how much of the coast line is inhabited land near sea level (which in the case of The Netherlands is all of it).
Really, countering sea level rise is very much a non-issue for first world countries. The people with issues are the ones living in shit poor countries or the ones that live in an estuary (which do not really lend themselves to flood control).
And: http://www.compendiumvoordeleefomgeving.nl/content/figuren/nl/2043_004k_clo_03_nl.jpg Although the red parts are dikes and the like that do not adhere to some norm, the amount of dikes that adhere to the norm has grown due to public spending. Yes, proactively protecting your country from the effects of storms and floods costs money. Tax money.
You jest, but I am seriously not impressed. What we see is an autopilot system for a helicopter that performs its job in perfect weather. Such systems already exist: http://www.pilotoutlook.com/helicopter_flying/autopilot
"A risk-minimizing algorithm was used to compute and command a safe trajectory continuously throughout 23 miles of rugged terrain in a single flight, at an average speed of 40 knots"
Wow, impressive. Especially the 'rugged' part. And the 40 knots (~75 km/h) part. And the fact that it kept a safe height of hundreds of feet from said rugged terrain ("The aircraft flew at an altitude between 200-400 feet about[sic] ground level."). Let's be honest: the autonomous terrain-maneuvering capabilities of this thing are dwarfed by most of the stuff we've seen quadcopters and other smaller UAVs do.
Some people find the geological and potential biological history of Mars intensely interesting. Not to mention the potential biological *present* of Mars - if it ever had life then some/most of it is probably still there, just not on the surface (it's estimated that the vast majority, possibly high 90s%, of Earth life is subterranean microbes) Just because *you* don't think it competes with the next episode of Desperate Housewives isn't any sort of claim as to how inherently interesting it is. We've only begun to scratch the surface of the science to be done on Mars, and everything we've done to date could have been done in a week or two by a research team that was there in person.
For the record, you're the one who mentioned Desperate Housewives. I previously had no knowledge of it even existing, but thank you for pointing out this valuable addition to Western culture. More to the point, I'll repeat: it's just not that interesting, which is largely due to it being a big fucking desert. But feel free to enlighten me on what great discoveries we might expect.
Also, I'm betting that the money, effort and energy it would cost to establish your human research squad would yield almost equal results when establishing a non-human research squad with those resources. Probably more. It's pretty unfair to compare the past pretty humble missions to a ridiculously more expensive hypothetical humans-on-mars mission.
In any case, I was arguing that we have done quite some research on Mars and have a lot more information on what benefits we could gain from going there. Which is nothing of economic interest and more importantly not 'absolutely nothing'. As opposed to the explorer and trader examples ledow mentioned.
Big difference: They either had no idea of what they would find (explorers), or knew exactly that great rewards could await them.
Pretty much the only interesting things about Mars are some geological history and potentially a biological history. I'm not saying it isn't cool or valuable to go there, just that it's not that interesting.
Other point: we would know a lot about the South Pole if no one had ever gone there in a stupid suicidal way.
" I'm not going to touch-type 70 words per minute on a touchscreen keyboard. But when I'm in the cramped quarters of a train, plane, or standing in a line — say, when the only thing standing between a critical email and its recipient is a few dozen words and a tap of the button marked "Send" — I can grab that Windows 8 laptop by its hinged section, one hand on either side of the screen, and tap out that message with my thumbs."
You have to be kidding me. That is the most ridiculous way to type anything on a laptop. Ever.
Yes, a very small window that is *very* difficult to survive through. [...] The point is it's nothing we couldn't survive (some of us at least, for a while) with today's technology using something like Biosphere 2.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here, but from what I've read about GRBs, the presence of an atmosphere is more of a problem than a measure of protection. A couple inches of lead should provide shielding against most GRBs.
Why do you assume this? Thanks to the power of exponential growth a single bacterium given unlimited food in a friendly predator-free ecosystem could reproduce to outmass the Earth in a few weeks. Assuming a race that can design bacteria to order the actual "active" terraforming phases might be extremely brief, with larger windows while the planetary chemistry stabilizes. For a race with sufficiently advanced bio-science it might even be accomplishable in years if you assume and "overshoot and correct" methodology to shorten the stabalization periods. As for obsolete, even on a thousands of years timescale you're still assuming a (probably non-biological) race that would have no interest in maintaining at least "natural" biological preserves (not even as a museum/zoo?).
A single species of bacteria is not an ecosystem, but I'll admit that on second thought, a well-engineered (set of) species could transform the atmosphere very fast.
Great, show me a rational species and I'll accept this argument. Heck, show me a rational *individual* and I'll think about it.
Well, we're not there yet:-) It seems slightly unreasonably skeptical to demand evidence of a prediction for the future. I claimed that efficiency is rational and it is, because rationality is utilitarian. In question form: what is the use of spending energy on things that almost certainly do not help you achieve your (sub)goals? It's probably more fuzzy, with a certain degree of uncertainty warranting spending a certain amount of energy on it.
The closest examples [of a rational individual] I can think of are some psychopaths and sociopaths, not exactly what I'd want to base a species on.
And your opinion is very important to them;-)
There was I time when I considered total rationality a shining goal that everyone should strive for, but I've since come to the decision that while yes, some of our irrational biological drives are destructive, others like love, compassion, curiosity, etc. are what make life worth living. Answer me this - what motivation would a 100% rational being have to even continue it's own existence?
Because there is no reason to stop your own existence. Rationality would have that question boil down to: What is the reason for the universe? Because of our uncertainty of what that reason is it is rational to try to find out what it is. Incidentally, that is the same reason an atheist (like myself) shouldn't jump out of a window anytime soon;-)
[...] It wouldn't be rational to optimize away the "inefficiency" of biological life and luxury unless all other processes were already running at 100% efficiency. Even then such a tiny percentage would be completely lost in the noise of solar variability.
The question is on what basis an advanced civilization would make the decisions to support biological life. If somebody asked you to buy dog poop for [x = minute amount of money in a currency of your choice], it's not rational to say "Well, it's only [x], so yeah." or "You look like a nice guy, sure." At some point, a rational civilization will say: there is no reason to spend energy on that, so we are not going to do it. And as said elsewhere, if biological life is going to contend with technological life for energy, biological life will lose.
Yes, that or the submitter deliberately misquoted the article: "Auther first took the laptop to his FBI office and asked his colleagues how to wipe it clean. Apparently they don’t have many cyber experts in the Mariana Islands, because they were unsuccessful. So Auther had to instead take it to a computer repair shop, which cleaned out the old files and allegedly reimaged the hard drive to return it to its original settings."
Sounds to me like there wasn't any professional FBI 'scrubbing' involved, just some guy going to work and talking about wiping a laptop by the water cooler.
GRBs typically last for only a few seconds, [...] at the very least any sealed underground habitats will likely be in far better shape than if they were free-floating in space.
If they can meaningfully survive the GRB, it is due to technology that is very very close to or beyond what would be necessary to survive a similar event 'free-floating in space'. That is the point. Sure, a planet helps, but the time window of its necessity for survival is very small.
[...] No, of course not - but once you've got a microbial-slime ecosystem
which will take millions of or at least thousands of years to meaningfully establish itself. A time period in which, again, technological advances will have rendered terraforming obsolete.
[romanticized anthropocentric story about space truckers and space grad students]
As appealing as it sounds, it is just not going to happen. Civilization leaving its biological substrate is a HUGE step and absolutely incomparable to the transition from ships to airplanes or something similar. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it. Really, forget about space truckers stopping for space coffee at space gas stations. Even we are not that far removed from humanless transportation (you can bet your ass that truckers and bus drivers are the first ones to go when driverless vehicles become legal). I too once reveled in dreams of a pretty-much-the-same-but-spacefaring society, imagining what space job I'd have or want to have, but in the end those are dreams, nothing more.
[...] I think we're getting into the realm of semantics there. Though I would suggest that when one individual bacteria copies genetic "tricks" from another, as has been happening since long before multicellular life arose, we're quite possibly dealing with some tiny slice of "consciousness", even if it's probably nowhere close to the same league as what what we, or even insects, are packing. Granted it's only recombinant DNA engineering and not the "create whole new genes" games we're playing, but it's still more than just random chance and statistical outcomes.
Well, I suppose you could define consciousness as such, but it becomes pretty useless and pretty far from what most people would consider consciousness to mean. The practical difference is that in your bacterial example extremely radical changes would have very little hope of survival, whereas genetic engineering and subsequent nurture could easily support extremely maladapted lifeforms (which may be better adapted to an environment in which they did not 'evolve' (per your definition), let's say: space).
The efficiency though... why should that be major consideration?
Because!;-) No, seriously, because of rationality. Efficiency is rational. Rationality is efficient. An advanced civilization will be utterly rational. Pissing away energy for luxuries is an irrational thing to do - for an advanced civilization, not for an individual in a crude civilization -. It should be no secret that most of the energy that we currently waste is being wasted because we evolved from apes and are still largely driven by a desire for biological procreation.
[...] Why, in such a glut of energy, would a species be driven to warp its fundamental nature for the sake of efficiency?
Like I said before, because what you call 'fundamental nature' is a terrible, terrible, absolutely dreadful hindrance to progress. The biggest problem in any field, hands down, is our human nature. It just causes soso much crap. Yes, also some beautiful things, but a lot more crap.
Lets put this in perspective [... useful calculations concerning energy use...] More importantly only the tiniest sliver of that energy is actually going towards keeping the biological entities alive.
[...] shield their artificial habitats from massive solar flares or surprise gamma-ray bursts that could easily destroy their habitats or themselves (keep in mind a GRB from outside the stellar plane could conceivably hit every habitat in a system virtually simultaneously with no warning, so shielding would have to be continuous).
GRBs are very rare and very directed. If one of them hits, being planet-based isn't going to add a lot to custom made protection measures. Protecting against solar flares in space isn't really a problem now, let alone in centuries time.
[...]
You've also failed to explain what makes you think these aliens, godlike or otherwise, would want to spend their entire life living in a giant tin can. It's certainly a conceivably viable option, but I can only assume you've never spent any time appreciating the wilderness and wide open spaces, it has much to offer that can't be simulated. [...]
I have. The reason you (and I) enjoy wilderness and wide open spaces is based in your (and my) biology. As much as I can enjoy the feelings my body experiences in certain situations, I am very aware that those feelings (with our bodies) will become obsolete in favor of efficiency. Your phrasing of 'a giant tin can' reveals that you are looking at the future in a romanticized anthropocentric fashion. The reality is that we are not the end point. The reality is that a lot of the systems we have put in place that we consider as part of civilization are designed to prevent our biological nature to manifest itself. Our natural way of being is one of selfish power (ab)use and our laws and political systems are designed to prevent that. The examples of where our biological background is a huge hindrance are everywhere and it is therefore that I think that an advanced civilization will have gotten rid of it.
[...] and both of them are potentially convertible to "primordial slime" Earth-analogues via nothing more than some cleverly designed microbes and a few centuries of time.
And then we just wait for a couple of billion years until terraforming is complete, like it happened on earth?
[...]As for planets being a harvestable matter source - sure, but unless you've already harvested all the asteroids, etc there's much more accessible sources. Why throw away the unique advantages of a planet for mere matter, unless for some truly stupendous project - in which case you'd probably look first to any gas giants which posses far more matter and (probably) far fewer useful applications as-is.
I'd say use all the matter and energy you can find. Waste nothing.
I would argue that genetic engineering - whether direct or via domestication/breeding programs does not render evolution irrelevant - it simply represents taking conscious control over what is usually a more chaotic process. [...]
You are misconstruing evolution. Evolution is governed by statistics (induced by pressure from the environment). Genetic engineering is governed by conscience (and whatever it wants to achieve).
There's a continuous thread in your argument that suggests you think any extremely advanced species would have discarded respect for the individual and/or coalesce into a single group-consciousness or collective, may I ask what your rationale for that is?
Efficiency. We are wasting huge amounts of energy by creating energy-hungry general purpose individuals. As argued earlier, in a lot of cases, the use they have for civilization as a whole can be realized by inorganic replacements that use a fraction of the energy that goes into their human counterparts. A factory robot doesn't need to commute every day. Furthermore, at this moment, we have probably five billion individuals that have the knowledge to tie shoelaces. I'm all for redundant storage, but keeping five billion copies of something trivial is probabl
At that point it becomes a question of why not rather than why.
Because it is useless and therefore irrational. The technological advancements that would take place in the time it takes to terraform are bound to be far more effective than terraforming.
And we're talking "humans in a few centuries" level of advanced, not godlike beings.
Technically, we were talking 'detecting other civilizations that may or may not have terraformed planets'. But a few centuries is a long time. Long enough for organic bodies to become irrelevant to a civilization (starting from where we are now).
A livable ecosystem is likely to always be valuable, if only as an emergency repair/refueling location.
No, it is not. Livable ecosystems are redundant if you have advanced ways to deal with whatever they might throw at you.
And so what if they've figured out how to do what they want with the planet without terraforming? You're presuming they only want one thing, and that it would interfere with the process already unleashed.
No, I am presuming they wouldn't invest resources in flooding that planet with CFCs. I'm not really feeling your implication that terraforming is a matter of cheaply throwing some cheap stuff at a planet and waiting for terraforming to complete. I think it would take considerable resources to actually terraform a planet. If not, it would probably be a process indistinguishable from a process started naturally or by simple chance.
I'd quite agree about 1 billion individuals (but are you volunteering to remove your redundant self? Or your children?)
I wasn't implying actively striving for that number, simply that the idea 'we need (to support) more people and thus need terraformed planets' is false. Whether I would volunteer in removing myself is an interesting question. I'd say that civilization would be losing a great mind, so no;-);-) Honestly, I'm not that big on individualism, so I doubt I would care too much would I have to actually make such a choice.
and I wouldn't be surprised if we actually stabilize at something closer to that number within the millenium, via simple negative population growth if we avoid any major catastrophes. On Earth. But once you get into space that changes there's no longer any population pressure except for our desire to not build more habitats.
It's not about population pressure. It is about redundancy and resources. Only if more individuals increase the progress of a civilization are they worth the energy to create/sustain them to a sufficiently advanced civilization.
Eventually the star is little more than an unwieldy (if extremely reliable) fusion reactor.
Yes, a harvestable energy source. Planets are a harvestable matter source. Although at some point the difference will become moot.
Oh and as an aside - no, so long as all reproduction isn't reduced to perfect cloning of a single individual evolution will remain completely relevant - it's the one eternally relevant factor. The particular traits it selects for may change, but it will always cause the species to drift towards those reproducing the most.
Or towards whatever we engineer the reproduction process to produce. We've been doing it with crops and animals for millennia. Think about pretty much every important crop or animal we feed on and it is most probably already far out of the reach of biological (Darwinistic) evolution (and as a result fairly incapable of surviving on its own). Granted, for humans the favored results of a breeding process aren't as clear cut and thus there are some ethical issues around it that may have caused some wars here and there. On the other hand genetic engineering, the newer way of making biological evolution irrelevant, is far more precise an
1 and 3 through 6 rely on the assumption that an advanced civilization still cares about billions of organically evolving individuals (or an ecosystem, for that matter). The 7 billion humans that exist today are largely redundant. I'd say that our current civilization could easily thrive as well (or even better) if we were 1 billion individuals. Biological evolution has already become largely irrelevant when it comes to insuring survival and progress and will become completely obsolete in the next century due to bioengineering and cybernetics. For a lot of service jobs, physical presence is also already mostly irrelevant and industrial jobs have been and are being taken over by more potent robotic workers. The list of reasons why the biological substrate will certainly perish goes on and on.
As for 2: yes, they are. They are also pretty hard to adapt or move. In the centuries it takes to make the planet habitable, any civilization could figure out to do whatever it is they want to do on that planet without terraforming. More importantly, I can't think of any meaningful protection a planet gives that an advanced civilization cannot easily emulate.
Slashdot Mirror
Pre-Win7:
CTRL+Click on the tasks in taskbar, Right click, Tile horizontally/vertically
Win7:
WIN+Left/Right (and to a lesser extent: up and down)
WIN+SHIFT+Left/Right (for multimonitor cases)
Also, AMD has Hydragrid, which was pretty decent, last time I checked. But in Win7, I find it largely superfluous.
I did not. Thanks for this insight.
So maybe add noise?
If that fails too, I give up ;-)
Good point. A lowpass filter should still work, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-V
Expensive, but at least it's viable.
You do realize that in general the bigger the country, the larger the proportion of land area (and thus population) to perimeter is?
Very important from a national perspective is of course also how much of your border is coastline (which in the case of The Netherlands is roughly half of it).
Also important is of course how much of the coast line is inhabited land near sea level (which in the case of The Netherlands is all of it).
Really, countering sea level rise is very much a non-issue for first world countries. The people with issues are the ones living in shit poor countries or the ones that live in an estuary (which do not really lend themselves to flood control).
Yes, we do ;-)
Yes. It is almost impossible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlands
And: http://www.compendiumvoordeleefomgeving.nl/content/figuren/nl/2043_004k_clo_03_nl.jpg
Although the red parts are dikes and the like that do not adhere to some norm, the amount of dikes that adhere to the norm has grown due to public spending. Yes, proactively protecting your country from the effects of storms and floods costs money. Tax money.
That is annually about EUR 1*10^9.
GDP of the Netherlands is ~EUR 700*10^9.
So, assuming no growth of the GDP, that means an annual expenditure of ~0.14% of GDP.
How will The Netherlands ever find that kind of cash?
Wow, lunch. You're really putting your money where your mouth is, eh, tough guy?
(edit)
Better link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#.5EH
Apparently, the style figure is a form of epanorthosis. Learnt something today.
You're doing it wrong.
I completely agree: Autonomous UAVs are the future.
That doesn't change how underwhelming this particular story and the accompanying video are.
You jest, but I am seriously not impressed.
What we see is an autopilot system for a helicopter that performs its job in perfect weather. Such systems already exist: http://www.pilotoutlook.com/helicopter_flying/autopilot
"A risk-minimizing algorithm was used to compute and command a safe trajectory continuously throughout 23 miles of rugged terrain in a single flight, at an average speed of 40 knots"
Wow, impressive. Especially the 'rugged' part. And the 40 knots (~75 km/h) part. And the fact that it kept a safe height of hundreds of feet from said rugged terrain ("The aircraft flew at an altitude between 200-400 feet about[sic] ground level.").
Let's be honest: the autonomous terrain-maneuvering capabilities of this thing are dwarfed by most of the stuff we've seen quadcopters and other smaller UAVs do.
Some people find the geological and potential biological history of Mars intensely interesting. Not to mention the potential biological *present* of Mars - if it ever had life then some/most of it is probably still there, just not on the surface (it's estimated that the vast majority, possibly high 90s%, of Earth life is subterranean microbes) Just because *you* don't think it competes with the next episode of Desperate Housewives isn't any sort of claim as to how inherently interesting it is. We've only begun to scratch the surface of the science to be done on Mars, and everything we've done to date could have been done in a week or two by a research team that was there in person.
For the record, you're the one who mentioned Desperate Housewives. I previously had no knowledge of it even existing, but thank you for pointing out this valuable addition to Western culture.
More to the point, I'll repeat: it's just not that interesting, which is largely due to it being a big fucking desert. But feel free to enlighten me on what great discoveries we might expect.
Also, I'm betting that the money, effort and energy it would cost to establish your human research squad would yield almost equal results when establishing a non-human research squad with those resources. Probably more.
It's pretty unfair to compare the past pretty humble missions to a ridiculously more expensive hypothetical humans-on-mars mission.
In any case, I was arguing that we have done quite some research on Mars and have a lot more information on what benefits we could gain from going there. Which is nothing of economic interest and more importantly not 'absolutely nothing'. As opposed to the explorer and trader examples ledow mentioned.
Big difference:
They either had no idea of what they would find (explorers), or knew exactly that great rewards could await them.
Pretty much the only interesting things about Mars are some geological history and potentially a biological history. I'm not saying it isn't cool or valuable to go there, just that it's not that interesting.
Other point: we would know a lot about the South Pole if no one had ever gone there in a stupid suicidal way.
It's not that ridiculous. I've typed on my old Galaxy 10.1 that way.
Which is a laptop, right?
That would make your comment very relevant.
" I'm not going to touch-type 70 words per minute on a touchscreen keyboard. But when I'm in the cramped quarters of a train, plane, or standing in a line — say, when the only thing standing between a critical email and its recipient is a few dozen words and a tap of the button marked "Send" — I can grab that Windows 8 laptop by its hinged section, one hand on either side of the screen, and tap out that message with my thumbs."
You have to be kidding me. That is the most ridiculous way to type anything on a laptop. Ever.
Yes, a very small window that is *very* difficult to survive through. [...] The point is it's nothing we couldn't survive (some of us at least, for a while) with today's technology using something like Biosphere 2.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here, but from what I've read about GRBs, the presence of an atmosphere is more of a problem than a measure of protection. A couple inches of lead should provide shielding against most GRBs.
Why do you assume this? Thanks to the power of exponential growth a single bacterium given unlimited food in a friendly predator-free ecosystem could reproduce to outmass the Earth in a few weeks. Assuming a race that can design bacteria to order the actual "active" terraforming phases might be extremely brief, with larger windows while the planetary chemistry stabilizes. For a race with sufficiently advanced bio-science it might even be accomplishable in years if you assume and "overshoot and correct" methodology to shorten the stabalization periods. As for obsolete, even on a thousands of years timescale you're still assuming a (probably non-biological) race that would have no interest in maintaining at least "natural" biological preserves (not even as a museum/zoo?).
A single species of bacteria is not an ecosystem, but I'll admit that on second thought, a well-engineered (set of) species could transform the atmosphere very fast.
Great, show me a rational species and I'll accept this argument. Heck, show me a rational *individual* and I'll think about it.
Well, we're not there yet :-) It seems slightly unreasonably skeptical to demand evidence of a prediction for the future. I claimed that efficiency is rational and it is, because rationality is utilitarian. In question form: what is the use of spending energy on things that almost certainly do not help you achieve your (sub)goals?
It's probably more fuzzy, with a certain degree of uncertainty warranting spending a certain amount of energy on it.
The closest examples [of a rational individual] I can think of are some psychopaths and sociopaths, not exactly what I'd want to base a species on.
And your opinion is very important to them ;-)
There was I time when I considered total rationality a shining goal that everyone should strive for, but I've since come to the decision that while yes, some of our irrational biological drives are destructive, others like love, compassion, curiosity, etc. are what make life worth living. Answer me this - what motivation would a 100% rational being have to even continue it's own existence?
Because there is no reason to stop your own existence. Rationality would have that question boil down to: What is the reason for the universe? ;-)
Because of our uncertainty of what that reason is it is rational to try to find out what it is.
Incidentally, that is the same reason an atheist (like myself) shouldn't jump out of a window anytime soon
[...] It wouldn't be rational to optimize away the "inefficiency" of biological life and luxury unless all other processes were already running at 100% efficiency. Even then such a tiny percentage would be completely lost in the noise of solar variability.
The question is on what basis an advanced civilization would make the decisions to support biological life. If somebody asked you to buy dog poop for [x = minute amount of money in a currency of your choice], it's not rational to say "Well, it's only [x], so yeah." or "You look like a nice guy, sure."
At some point, a rational civilization will say: there is no reason to spend energy on that, so we are not going to do it. And as said elsewhere, if biological life is going to contend with technological life for energy, biological life will lose.
How exactly are you defining progress?
"But my funding depends on my numbers being run!"
Yes, that or the submitter deliberately misquoted the article:
"Auther first took the laptop to his FBI office and asked his colleagues how to wipe it clean. Apparently they don’t have many cyber experts in the Mariana Islands, because they were unsuccessful. So Auther had to instead take it to a computer repair shop, which cleaned out the old files and allegedly reimaged the hard drive to return it to its original settings."
Sounds to me like there wasn't any professional FBI 'scrubbing' involved, just some guy going to work and talking about wiping a laptop by the water cooler.
The gravitational pull of the arctic ice (or lack of it) is on of the most influential factors:
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_secret_of_sea_level_rise_it_will_vary_greatly_by_region/2255/
GRBs typically last for only a few seconds, [...] at the very least any sealed underground habitats will likely be in far better shape than if they were free-floating in space.
If they can meaningfully survive the GRB, it is due to technology that is very very close to or beyond what would be necessary to survive a similar event 'free-floating in space'. That is the point. Sure, a planet helps, but the time window of its necessity for survival is very small.
[...] No, of course not - but once you've got a microbial-slime ecosystem
which will take millions of or at least thousands of years to meaningfully establish itself. A time period in which, again, technological advances will have rendered terraforming obsolete.
[romanticized anthropocentric story about space truckers and space grad students]
As appealing as it sounds, it is just not going to happen. Civilization leaving its biological substrate is a HUGE step and absolutely incomparable to the transition from ships to airplanes or something similar. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Really, forget about space truckers stopping for space coffee at space gas stations. Even we are not that far removed from humanless transportation (you can bet your ass that truckers and bus drivers are the first ones to go when driverless vehicles become legal).
I too once reveled in dreams of a pretty-much-the-same-but-spacefaring society, imagining what space job I'd have or want to have, but in the end those are dreams, nothing more.
[...] I think we're getting into the realm of semantics there. Though I would suggest that when one individual bacteria copies genetic "tricks" from another, as has been happening since long before multicellular life arose, we're quite possibly dealing with some tiny slice of "consciousness", even if it's probably nowhere close to the same league as what what we, or even insects, are packing. Granted it's only recombinant DNA engineering and not the "create whole new genes" games we're playing, but it's still more than just random chance and statistical outcomes.
Well, I suppose you could define consciousness as such, but it becomes pretty useless and pretty far from what most people would consider consciousness to mean. The practical difference is that in your bacterial example extremely radical changes would have very little hope of survival, whereas genetic engineering and subsequent nurture could easily support extremely maladapted lifeforms (which may be better adapted to an environment in which they did not 'evolve' (per your definition), let's say: space).
The efficiency though... why should that be major consideration?
Because! ;-)
No, seriously, because of rationality. Efficiency is rational. Rationality is efficient. An advanced civilization will be utterly rational. Pissing away energy for luxuries is an irrational thing to do - for an advanced civilization, not for an individual in a crude civilization -. It should be no secret that most of the energy that we currently waste is being wasted because we evolved from apes and are still largely driven by a desire for biological procreation.
[...] Why, in such a glut of energy, would a species be driven to warp its fundamental nature for the sake of efficiency?
Like I said before, because what you call 'fundamental nature' is a terrible, terrible, absolutely dreadful hindrance to progress. The biggest problem in any field, hands down, is our human nature. It just causes so so much crap. Yes, also some beautiful things, but a lot more crap.
Lets put this in perspective [... useful calculations concerning energy use ...] More importantly only the tiniest sliver of that energy is actually going towards keeping the biological entities alive.
Well, one would imag
[...] shield their artificial habitats from massive solar flares or surprise gamma-ray bursts that could easily destroy their habitats or themselves (keep in mind a GRB from outside the stellar plane could conceivably hit every habitat in a system virtually simultaneously with no warning, so shielding would have to be continuous).
GRBs are very rare and very directed. If one of them hits, being planet-based isn't going to add a lot to custom made protection measures. Protecting against solar flares in space isn't really a problem now, let alone in centuries time.
[...]
You've also failed to explain what makes you think these aliens, godlike or otherwise, would want to spend their entire life living in a giant tin can. It's certainly a conceivably viable option, but I can only assume you've never spent any time appreciating the wilderness and wide open spaces, it has much to offer that can't be simulated. [...]
I have. The reason you (and I) enjoy wilderness and wide open spaces is based in your (and my) biology. As much as I can enjoy the feelings my body experiences in certain situations, I am very aware that those feelings (with our bodies) will become obsolete in favor of efficiency.
Your phrasing of 'a giant tin can' reveals that you are looking at the future in a romanticized anthropocentric fashion. The reality is that we are not the end point. The reality is that a lot of the systems we have put in place that we consider as part of civilization are designed to prevent our biological nature to manifest itself. Our natural way of being is one of selfish power (ab)use and our laws and political systems are designed to prevent that.
The examples of where our biological background is a huge hindrance are everywhere and it is therefore that I think that an advanced civilization will have gotten rid of it.
[...] and both of them are potentially convertible to "primordial slime" Earth-analogues via nothing more than some cleverly designed microbes and a few centuries of time.
And then we just wait for a couple of billion years until terraforming is complete, like it happened on earth?
[...]As for planets being a harvestable matter source - sure, but unless you've already harvested all the asteroids, etc there's much more accessible sources. Why throw away the unique advantages of a planet for mere matter, unless for some truly stupendous project - in which case you'd probably look first to any gas giants which posses far more matter and (probably) far fewer useful applications as-is.
I'd say use all the matter and energy you can find. Waste nothing.
I would argue that genetic engineering - whether direct or via domestication/breeding programs does not render evolution irrelevant - it simply represents taking conscious control over what is usually a more chaotic process. [...]
You are misconstruing evolution. Evolution is governed by statistics (induced by pressure from the environment). Genetic engineering is governed by conscience (and whatever it wants to achieve).
There's a continuous thread in your argument that suggests you think any extremely advanced species would have discarded respect for the individual and/or coalesce into a single group-consciousness or collective, may I ask what your rationale for that is?
Efficiency. We are wasting huge amounts of energy by creating energy-hungry general purpose individuals. As argued earlier, in a lot of cases, the use they have for civilization as a whole can be realized by inorganic replacements that use a fraction of the energy that goes into their human counterparts. A factory robot doesn't need to commute every day.
Furthermore, at this moment, we have probably five billion individuals that have the knowledge to tie shoelaces. I'm all for redundant storage, but keeping five billion copies of something trivial is probabl
At that point it becomes a question of why not rather than why.
Because it is useless and therefore irrational. The technological advancements that would take place in the time it takes to terraform are bound to be far more effective than terraforming.
And we're talking "humans in a few centuries" level of advanced, not godlike beings.
Technically, we were talking 'detecting other civilizations that may or may not have terraformed planets'. But a few centuries is a long time. Long enough for organic bodies to become irrelevant to a civilization (starting from where we are now).
A livable ecosystem is likely to always be valuable, if only as an emergency repair/refueling location.
No, it is not. Livable ecosystems are redundant if you have advanced ways to deal with whatever they might throw at you.
And so what if they've figured out how to do what they want with the planet without terraforming? You're presuming they only want one thing, and that it would interfere with the process already unleashed.
No, I am presuming they wouldn't invest resources in flooding that planet with CFCs. I'm not really feeling your implication that terraforming is a matter of cheaply throwing some cheap stuff at a planet and waiting for terraforming to complete. I think it would take considerable resources to actually terraform a planet. If not, it would probably be a process indistinguishable from a process started naturally or by simple chance.
I'd quite agree about 1 billion individuals (but are you volunteering to remove your redundant self? Or your children?)
I wasn't implying actively striving for that number, simply that the idea 'we need (to support) more people and thus need terraformed planets' is false. Whether I would volunteer in removing myself is an interesting question. I'd say that civilization would be losing a great mind, so no ;-) ;-)
Honestly, I'm not that big on individualism, so I doubt I would care too much would I have to actually make such a choice.
and I wouldn't be surprised if we actually stabilize at something closer to that number within the millenium, via simple negative population growth if we avoid any major catastrophes. On Earth. But once you get into space that changes there's no longer any population pressure except for our desire to not build more habitats.
It's not about population pressure. It is about redundancy and resources. Only if more individuals increase the progress of a civilization are they worth the energy to create/sustain them to a sufficiently advanced civilization.
Eventually the star is little more than an unwieldy (if extremely reliable) fusion reactor.
Yes, a harvestable energy source. Planets are a harvestable matter source. Although at some point the difference will become moot.
Oh and as an aside - no, so long as all reproduction isn't reduced to perfect cloning of a single individual evolution will remain completely relevant - it's the one eternally relevant factor. The particular traits it selects for may change, but it will always cause the species to drift towards those reproducing the most.
Or towards whatever we engineer the reproduction process to produce. We've been doing it with crops and animals for millennia. Think about pretty much every important crop or animal we feed on and it is most probably already far out of the reach of biological (Darwinistic) evolution (and as a result fairly incapable of surviving on its own).
Granted, for humans the favored results of a breeding process aren't as clear cut and thus there are some ethical issues around it that may have caused some wars here and there.
On the other hand genetic engineering, the newer way of making biological evolution irrelevant, is far more precise an
1 and 3 through 6 rely on the assumption that an advanced civilization still cares about billions of organically evolving individuals (or an ecosystem, for that matter).
The 7 billion humans that exist today are largely redundant. I'd say that our current civilization could easily thrive as well (or even better) if we were 1 billion individuals. Biological evolution has already become largely irrelevant when it comes to insuring survival and progress and will become completely obsolete in the next century due to bioengineering and cybernetics. For a lot of service jobs, physical presence is also already mostly irrelevant and industrial jobs have been and are being taken over by more potent robotic workers. The list of reasons why the biological substrate will certainly perish goes on and on.
As for 2: yes, they are. They are also pretty hard to adapt or move.
In the centuries it takes to make the planet habitable, any civilization could figure out to do whatever it is they want to do on that planet without terraforming.
More importantly, I can't think of any meaningful protection a planet gives that an advanced civilization cannot easily emulate.